Charles Bernstein Visit Posted on July 5, 2009 by Kevin Killian
Charles Bernstein reading in June at 21 Grand in Oakland. Electrifying event.
Charles Bernstein is a poet, professor and theorist, and he co-edited the influential journal of poetics called L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E back in the heroic age of Language Poetry (1978-81). Recently he got the art world up in arms when he published a provocative article in Parkett magazine, the spring issue with Zoe Leonard, Tomma Abts, Mai-Thu Perret. Bernstein’s article asks, “Is Art Criticism Fifty Years Behind Poetry?” and pretty much says, yes, indeed it is, or more so. This question may sound vaguely familiar to some of you out there, for it is a reversal or takeoff on Brion Gysin’s remark that “Writing is fifty years behind painting. I propose to apply the painters’ techniques to writing; things as simple as immediate as collage or montage.”
Beneath the impudence of its trappings, Bernstein’s essay is a review of a recent book by New York-based poet and art writer Lytle Shaw, his 2006 monograph Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie (Iowa). Shaw’s subject is the peripatetic O’Hara (1926-1966), the poet everyone loves to love, but his bigger project is the reclamation of coterie, for many years—all through modernism in fact—the worst word in the world, the word that doomed whomever it was applied to. Pavel Tchelitchev, for example, one of the most interesting painters of mid-century, but now known only as a “coterie” painter. And most often “coterie” refers in a totally arch way, to homosexuality—that which may not be spoken. (more…)
